I’d like to start a discussion about TV privacy in 2023. I’ve never been interested in having a TV, but recently I was thinking of getting one. Looking into it, the privacy implications seem horrible. All the major brands seem to have cameras, microphones, and content recognition software. I can’t believe how dystopian it is.
I also notice that most of the articles about this are from a few years ago. Are things better now? Do they still collect an Orwellian amount of data?
As I understand it, there are a few mitigation options:
- Leave it disconnected from the internet and use a separate device for streaming. But it sounds like some brands have incessant nag screens, or disable features until connected to the internet. I was looking into the Samsung Frame TV, but I’m not even sure you can use the art mode without internet. Does anyone know?
- Pi-hole set up with a blocklist. It’s disheartening that such a technical solution would be necessary.
- Get a commercial “dumb” display. These are more expensive, and usually thicker.
- Go through the menu and disable privacy violating settings. Does this work? I’m doubtful.
edit: Just to be clear, I am NOT talking about the normal sort of ad tracking that happens when you use streaming services. Netflix knows what you’re watching regardless of what device you use. I’m talking about stuff like a hidden camera recording your facial reactions, microphones recording your private conversations, and screen recording of your viewing activities. This is sci-fi dystopia level creepy.
This is a very fair concern.
However, the thing to consider is with these Smart TV’s, and generally poor privacy companies and devices, is that they’ll always use the lowest hanging fruit where possible. I’d say the amount of data that the device will go through the lengths to collect offline and later upload are quite low.
Most Smart TV’s collect data from when people directly use the Smart TV itself (i.e. what apps and content you directly watch and download on it as an example). The vast majority of people who buy TV’s like this will just use the built-in Smart TV for watching media and for doing everything on the device, without even giving it a second thought, so the manufacturers basically automatically win and get data on 99% of consumers, without really any effort or work.
For people like us who do care and go through the trouble of circumventing it (i.e. not using the built-in Smart TV at all, and disconnecting the TV entirely from the internet besides for updates occasionally), I’d say that only leaves 2 issues: listening through the mic (I think this is unlikely since voice recordings take up a lot of storage space, as well as bandwith to upload, and like I said in my first comment, TV manufacturers really cheap out on these devices and cut corners wherever possible, and back to my point of the low hanging fruit, but regardless, if you’re concerned, then removing the mics or taping them would certainly solve this), and recording or storing what you view through other inputs like your streaming box (again I feel this is unlikely for same reasons as voice recording, it’d take up a lot of space and bandwith, isn’t quite practical, and they typically focus on the low hanging fruit).
These are both possible concerns, but I’d say they’re realistically extremely unlikely, especially due to how much effort and work it would take to spy on such a small portion of people. The investment and the amount of work and effort needed to do this just doesn’t make sense and isn’t really justified for them. If you’re still concerned, then I’d recommend just putting your TV behind a VPN and putting it into a separate VLAN whenever you do connect or update it (and also just taping/removing the microphone like I said above), or of course if you’re extra paranoid, you can always just leave it fully offline and deal without updates. But I personally just don’t see it as a major risk or something to worry about.
There definitely needs to be regulations on these devices, its completely unacceptable in its current state. It shouldn’t be this hard to just get something like a TV without it spying on you and completely invading your privacy, but I guess that’s the world we live in now. :/
Right, these seem like reasonable hypotheses. I see a LOT of “innovation” happening in this space, though. In the future, or maybe even the present, I think it would be trivial to use speech to text and store conversations as small text files. Let’s say anytime it hears a specific brand name, “Cheerios” or “Toyota”, it records the conversation in a text file and sends it to marketers for research. It’s really not unthinkable.
The recent Mozilla report confirms that cars are using your microphone to determine what song or podcast you’re listening to, and listening to your conversations, so it’s not as if this is paranoid conjecture. If there’s money in it, and no rules to stop them, I think it’s almost inevitable.
I think automatic content recognition works by capturing still frames at strategic moments, so it may not take as much data as we think. For example, studios apparently hide watermarks that identify shows and movies. Then you would just need to make the tv detect the watermarks, not store and send screenshots of the screen. Then it can send a tiny CVS file of when and for how long you watched the show. It wouldn’t even need to know the name of the show. The watermark could be an alphanumeric code, and so even new shows would be detectable.